Video

How To Fix Your Focus & Stop Procrastinating: Johann Hari (The Diary Of A CEO, E114)

Jan 2022 🇬🇧 The Diary Of A CEO

In this hour-and-a-half interview on Steven Bartlett's The Diary Of A CEO, Hari walks through the argument of Stolen Focus for a general business and self-improvement audience: that procrastination and lost focus are less a personal willpower problem than a predictable response to environments — apps, notifications, overwork, poor sleep — engineered to pull attention away from a single task. He discusses design choices in social platforms he associates with compulsive checking, and connects the same pressures on adult knowledge workers to what children experience with school and screens. The conversation moves between diagnosis and practical fixes, including boundary-setting and the case for regulatory and workplace-level change rather than relying solely on individual discipline. TechKids Foundation includes it as one of the highest-reach long-form interviews built around the book's argument.

CITATION

Hari, Johann, interviewed by Steven Bartlett. "How To Fix Your Focus & Stop Procrastinating: Johann Hari." The Diary Of A CEO, episode 114, January 10, 2022. YouTube.

REPORT A PROBLEM WITH THIS ENTRY

RELATED EVIDENCE

Talk

The Inside Story of How Silicon Valley Rewired Our Brains — Offline with Jon Favreau

Two days before The Chaos Machine published, Max Fisher joined Jon Favreau's Offline podcast for a long-form conversation about what his interviews with researchers, psychologists, whistleblowers, and Silicon Valley executives suggested about social media's effects on attention, culture, and politics. Fisher walks through the arc his book traces — from the creation of the Facebook newsfeed to the 2016 U.S. election — and argues that the pattern of harms he documented abroad is linked to the platforms' structural, engagement-maximizing design rather than to isolated bad actors. The discussion focuses on how ranking systems that reward outrage are associated with shifts in what users see, share, and believe. TechKids Foundation includes this episode as Fisher's most extended launch-week interview aimed at a general audience.

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 Crooked Media
Talk

The Chaos Machine: How Social Media Rewired Our Brains and Our World — The Rich Roll Podcast #703

In this two-hour-plus episode of The Rich Roll Podcast, Max Fisher discusses the reporting behind The Chaos Machine: how he came to cover social media as an international-affairs story, the ways he argues algorithmic feeds are associated with shifts in users' moral judgments and tolerance for outrage, and research he cites linking recommendation systems to greater acceptance of misinformation and, in volatile settings, susceptibility to violence. Fisher describes engagement-driven design as functioning like a habit-forming product, and the conversation closes with practical strategies for reducing exposure — from disabling algorithmic feeds to muting engagement metrics. TechKids Foundation includes this episode because it pairs Fisher's investigative findings with the kind of concrete, family-usable mitigation steps the library's solutions tag exists to surface.

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 The Rich Roll Podcast
Talk

Numlock Sunday: Max Fisher on The Chaos Machine

In this Numlock Sunday edition, data-journalism newsletter author Walt Hickey interviews Max Fisher about The Chaos Machine, with the full conversation published as a transcript. Fisher walks through the quantitative research he leans on most, including a large deactivation experiment in which people who stayed off Facebook for four weeks reported wellbeing gains he characterizes as roughly a third the effect of going to therapy, alongside meaningful reductions in political polarization. He describes engagement mechanics modeled on intermittent rewards, and connects the amplification of outrage content to the real-world cases — Myanmar, Sri Lanka — from his reporting. Because it is text, the interview doubles as a citable, quotable digest of the book's evidence. TechKids Foundation includes it as the most data-forward of Fisher's launch interviews.

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 Numlock News
Video

Le temps passé par les enfants devant les écrans est « hors normes, extravagant » (France Inter grand entretien)

Two months after La Fabrique du crétin digital was published, Michel Desmurget was the morning grand entretien guest on France Inter, France's most-listened-to public radio station, interviewed by Nicolas Demorand. The INSERM neuroscience research director calls the time French children now spend on recreational screens « hors normes, extravagant » — outside all norms — and walks through the associations his book draws from published research: heavier recreational screen use tracking with weaker language development, poorer concentration, lower school results, and shorter sleep. Desmurget's deliberately alarmist framing — a « fabrique du crétin » — is his own rhetoric, not a clinical finding, and the interview shows how that framing carried his synthesis into France's mainstream morning-news audience. TechKids includes it as the flagship French broadcast interview for the book, alongside the print interviews the same autumn.

Oct 2019 🇫🇷 France Inter (Radio France)
Talk

¿Cómo afectan las pantallas a tus hijos? (BBVA Aprendemos Juntos talk)

In this long-form filmed talk for Aprendemos Juntos 2030 — the Spanish-language education series produced by BBVA and distributed with El País — Michel Desmurget speaks for close to ninety minutes on how screens relate to children's development. The INSERM neuroscience research director argues that heavy recreational screen use is associated with weaker language, shorter attention, and disrupted sleep in children; contends that app and platform design is engineered to keep young users engaged; and dismisses the « digital natives » idea as a myth unsupported by the studies he reviews. He closes with his standing recommendations: little or no screen time in the early years, firm daily limits afterward, and reading as the leisure habit he says is most consistently associated with stronger cognitive and emotional development. TechKids includes it as his major Spanish-language talk, extending his French argument to a global audience.

Jun 2024 🇪🇸 BBVA Aprendemos Juntos 2030
News Investigation

« El consumo digital exacerbado devora todo lo emocional y lo cognitivo de nuestra humanidad » (La Nación interview)

This long interview by Hugo Alconada Mon, one of Argentina's best-known investigative journalists, ran in La Nación as Michel Desmurget's book reached Spanish-language readers in late 2020. Desmurget repeats his most provocative contention — that today's « digital natives » may be the first children to test lower on IQ than their parents — and lists the outcomes he says the research literature most consistently associates with heavy recreational screen use: slower language development, disrupted sleep, weaker concentration, lower school results, and higher risk of excess weight. He frames the cumulative exposure in school-time terms: by his estimate, the hours a child spends on recreational screens between ages two and eighteen rival roughly thirty school years' worth of classroom time. The IQ-reversal claim is Desmurget's own reading of Flynn-effect data, contested by other researchers; TechKids relays it as his, not as settled science.

Nov 2020 🇦🇷 La Nación
STAY CURRENT

Get new evidence in your inbox.

A weekly digest of what we added — studies, laws, films, hearings. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

SUBSCRIPTIONS PENDING — BUTTONDOWN ACCOUNT NOT CONNECTED

OR FOLLOW THE RSS FEED →